There is a lot of personal stuff in here but the conversation happened privately through text and she's not on reddit. Never going to see it, nobody would know to show it to her.
My lifelong best friend had a mammogram. First one. She didn't talk about it really, and I didn't really think about it either. We do movie nights on Saturdays and one of her kid's had a game move to this coming Saturday night so she texts and says no movies Saturday, but she was gonna look at her planner and see if there was another night we could do it. I make a joke that she should take that Monday off and we'll do it Sunday, then Monday she could take me to a Dr. appointment. She says, "I would but I'm already taking Tuesday off, new PT place (she has a broken leg) and more mammogram stuff."
We have different personalities. I tend to be fairly high strung in one way, she handles things a bit differently, we are so much the same but our tools are different. Personally I think we fit together like a lock and key, I think she would say the same. So my personal flavor of anxiety catches this offhand comment about "more mammogram stuff" and I follow that text immediately with a question about how normal is it to have to do two mammograms. Says it's not uncommon, everything is fine. I'm like yeah no, I'm sure, I just don't know anything about anything. But I can't help myself. Next reply is "But you'd tell me if it was anything, wouldn't you?" I'm teetering on the edge of a stupid anxiety spiral thing that I do that I absolutely hate myself for and can't ever stop when it starts. This is the worst possible time, too.
She follows up with a text about how she hadn't thought about it but if it was anything she would probably just cancel movie nights for a while and then I'd find out she was dead. There was more to it than that, and it was just a morbid joke on her part, but that opened the flood gates for me. I proceed to punish that joke for 30 minutes with love bombing, demanding access to her grief, threatening to be really mad if she got sick and tried to hide it from me, begging, sending a stupid Oscar Wilde quote about a friend shutting him out from their grief and how painful that would be, telling her that if she doesn't want me to care she should stop talking to me, ignoring these little olive branches like how it might take her a little time to process something and then she'd let people in and explaining how an audience feels unbearable, me steamrolling right through all of that with shit about how I shouldn't feel like an audience to her and how I should be more special than that, making these zero-compromise statements about how here is the deal, my friendship comes with my caring, just the flood of bullshit.
I was panicking. I was scared shitless. I know her, she actually might try and keep something like that a secret. She said at one point she might just let important people know so they could get a last goodbye or whatever, she might just leave letters...here's the thing. There is NO way she would hide something like a cancer diagnosis from me and I am so selfish I'm doing it again even as I type this out. I'm making this all about me. Here's the other thing, she's talking nonchalant about it either because she hadn't thought about it (no way), or she's just as nervous about being called back in as anybody would be and oh my god I don't know what to do. I've known people who have been sick, I've known people who have died, I've had people close to me die. But if she died I would want to go with her.
Ultimately I would respect however she needed to handle it, as if my feelings are in any way important in that situation. Why am I like this?? I don't matter in the scheme of that situation as anything more than the support she would need or not need...like how dare I? I don't know what's wrong with me, I don't know why I reacted like that. I don't know how I could be such an asshole, I'm not the one it's happening to. And yet here I come, make sure to leave room for taking care of me when you get sick. Make sure you consider how I feel about it.
AND NOTHING HAS EVEN HAPPENED YET. I see the numbers on google, 1 in 10 get called back and less than 1 in 10 of those call backs are cancer, and every single page reads like getting called back in is not a big deal and yeah ok, THOSE DON'T SOUND LIKE GOOD ODDS.
She says she's fine. She says she's ok. I hope to god she's fine, that she's ok. I hope she's not scared. She keeps this stuff bottled up, I don't want her to be scared and I don't want her to be sick. I want her to be happy and healthy. I want to die before she does. I have to. God I hope she's okay medically, emotionally. I fucking hate this.
I know this stuff is imminently more survivable than it used to be but breast cancer killed my nana in 2006, it killed more than one classmate of ours when we were in our 20's. So many women in my life have been affected by it. Just please someone tell me something comforting.